Forensic experts study remains of migrants
CIUDAD JUÁREZ — Mexican forensic experts are examining a mass grave in the Chihuahuan desert and sifting through human remains they believe belong to a group of 13 Mexican migrants who went missing nearly two years ago, U.S. and Mexican authorities said.
The investigation coincides with the detention of a top drug cartel leader who is a U.S. citizen, the authorities said.
Investigators found the remains of 10 bodies in the Chihuahua municipality of Coyame del Sotol near the West Texas border city of Presidio, authorities said.
At least nine of the bodies have been identified through DNA as part of the group of 13 who had disappeared Sept. 25, 2021, as they headed to find work in U.S. cities, including Midland, Texas, and Dallas, according to Gabino Gómez Escárcega, a human rights activist. He leads the Centro de Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres, or the Women’s Human Rights Center, in Chihuahua City.
The exhumation of the bodies came just days after Sergio Menchaca Pizarro, known as El Menchaca, surrendered to U.S. authorities in Presidio, setting off renewed cartel violence in the region.
Menchaca provided information about the mass grave’s location, four U.S. officials and three Mexican officials told The Dallas Morning News. Menchaca has not been charged with a crime, and there was no order for his arrest in Mexico, according to Mexican state and federal officials.
U.S. Border Patrol agents Aug. 17 encountered Menchaca “walking westbound along FM170 near Fort Leaton,” a state historic site near Presidio, according to federal court records. Border Patrol agents conducted an immigration inspection and learned Menchaca is a U.S. citizen, the records state.
Since then, Menchaca has been detained by the U.S. government, pending a hearing, according to the court records. The evidence against Menchaca is substantial, the records state, and although he is a U.S. citizen, he lives and works in Mexico and has extended family there.
Fort Worth-based attorney J. Warren St. John, listed as Menchaca’s criminal defense lawyer, did not return calls placed to his office.
Menchaca refused to be interviewed by Pretrial Services, and his history, family ties, financial resources and health could not be confirmed, the records state. There “is no condition or combination of conditions which could reasonably assure the appearance of the Defendant (in court) as required and the safety of the community,” according to the court records.
“There is clear and convincing evidence that the Defendant is a danger to the community as well as a preponderance of the evidence which indicates that the Defendant is a risk of flight,” the records state. “Therefore, the Defendant is DETAINED.”
Border Patrol officials, citing the sensitivity of the issue, refused to comment on the case, as did officials with the Drug Enforcement Administration. A DEA spokeswoman in Dallas referred calls to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the U.S. Western District of Texas, which did not respond to inquiries.
Several media outlets in Chihuahua reported on the detention of Menchaca on Aug. 18, and cited confirmation by Chihuahua State Attorney General Cesar Jauregui Moreno. His spokesman later said the statement could not be corroborated and declined to elaborate.
Oscar Hagelsieb, a former assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations unit in El Paso and most recently in Ciudad Juárez, told The Dallas Morning News the arrest of Menchaca provided long-sought answers about the whereabouts of the 13 missing men.
“He’s as big as they come,” said Hagelsieb, CEO of Hagelsieb Strategic Investigations, a security consultant firm in El Paso. “The bodies, the information about their location, all of this is coming from El Menchaca. He knows where the bodies are,” he said, citing his own intelligence gathering.
Hagelsieb has followed Menchaca and other key members of organized crime from his days in Mexican cities including Monterrey, Nuevo Laredo and Ciudad Juárez. Hagelsieb described Menchaca as head of La Linea in the Ojinaga region, some 250 miles from Ciudad Juárez.
“It’s important to note that El Menchaca turned himself in, running for his life,” Hagelsieb said.
Gómez, the human rights activist, said forensic officials have taken DNA from several of the wives of the migrants who disappeared. “Once we were told that El Menchaca was in U.S. custody, we knew this was an opportunity to find answers,” Gómez said. “And we did, in the worst way.”
Gómez said Friday he is waiting for the family of the 10th victim to do a DNA test. He said the whereabouts of the three missing migrants remained unknown.
The migrants were likely massacred by members of organized crime, as part of a rising feud over smuggling routes in Mexico’s northern state, said Hagelsieb, Gómez and other officials.
The migrants were last heard from as they traveled in Lomas de Arena, a tiny Mexican village right up against the Rio Grande, neighboring Hudspeth and Culberson counties in far West Texas.
Mexican state and federal authorities have long conducted search operations in the region and said they found nothing.
The case is among a rash of grisly disappearances across Mexico. On Aug. 14, authorities announced they had discovered the body parts of at least 13 people in freezers in the state of Veracruz.
On Aug. 15, a video spread online of a young man slicing another’s neck with a knife, on orders of what appear to be his captors. The two were likely members of a group of five youths who had vanished in the western state of Jalisco.
The administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador “has been the worst in regards to the Mexicans who disappeared,” said author and journalist Marcela Turati, who questioned the government’s strategy and commitment to find the disappeared and give tens of thousands closure.
López Obrador, whose office did not respond to a request for comment, has pushed back against those assertions, saying his government has other data to show the number of disappeared is falling,
From Ciudad Juárez and Guadalajara to Mexico City, memorials are filled with crosses, posters and names of the disappeared. Mexico has more than 111,000 missing people, according to a government registry. By comparison, in the U.S., as of Dec. 31, 2021, the National Crime Information Center, using FBI data, contained 93,718 active missing person records.